David Parkin's Delusions of grandeur Book

They take notes and raise their eyebrows. Then they section me. At five o’clock in the morning I am taken to The Bradgate Mental Health Unit in Glenfield Hospital. I shouldn’t be here. This is a mistake. This is madness.

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In 2015 David Parkin suffered his first bipolar manic episode and was sectioned for four months. Being a self-obsessed arty farty weirdo he then made an installation about his experience called ‘David Parkin’s Delusions of Grandeur’. This book contains written elements of the installation plus extra stuff. Packed with bite size chunks that tell you everything you didn’t want to know about getting locked up by the NHS, it might just be the best toilet book about bipolar and sectioning ever made. 

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In his two-fisted prose, Dave takes us through his stay at the NHS’s pleasure. It’s all here: falling madly obsessively in love, escaping to a Champagne Bar, being punched by a fellow inmate and his inevitable fall from his bewildering high. 

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Also check out Dave’s notebook he kept at the time with startling insights in to how to save the NHS with ART and how best to share cigarettes with negative magic people. 

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"Terrifying, poignant, and would be harrowing and depressing were it not for the hilarity you inject.

I couldn't put it down! And laughed out loud many times (I don't do that often). Very dark, very funny, pretty brutal."